Menu

Karen Junod

Ph. D , Oxford University

Karen Junod earned her first degree in English, German and Art History at the University of Neuchatel in Switzerland. Following a yearlong research assistantship in the Art History department at the University of Neuchatel, she entered the Ph.D program in English Language and Literature at Oxford University, earning her degree in 2005. Her Ph.D thesis explored the biographies of British artists in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. Her research and teaching interests include the relationships between British art and literature in the 18th and 19th centuries; Anglo-German literary and cultural connections; biography/autobiography; history of the book; genre theory, and artists books. She has published articles in various journals, including The Age of Johnson, Word and Image, and Eighteenth-Century Studies.

Dr. Junod’s final lecture is titled “Travelling in Germany: A Grand Tour through the Beinecke Osborn Collection (1760-1850).” For several decades, the Grand Tour that circuit of Continental Europe undertaken by a wealthy social elite for pleasure, culture, education has been the subject of many scholarly books and articles. Most analyses have focused on individuals touring in Italy and France, and have largely ignored British travellers impressions of Germany despite a significant rise in the number of people travelling to Germany between 1760 and 1850. Several reasons explain this cultural shift: political turmoil in France caused travellers to explore geographical horizons beyond the traditional limits of the Grand Tour, including Germany. Moreover, when the Continent reopened in 1815, the usual route that British travellers had followed in the eighteenth century shifted to an itinerary more congruent with Romantic sensibilities and was no longer necessarily guided by a classical agenda. Junod’s illustrated talk explores a series of manuscript travel literature about Germany written in the eighteenth and first half of the nineteenth centuries, at a time when the German Grand Tour had not yet been transformed into a mass-tourism and collective experience through the publication of the highly popular guidebooks of the Murray and Baedeker firms.